Blog Table of Contents Whitey Bulger “In the immediate aftermath of the April 15, 2013, bombings, Boston police commissioner Ed Davis. said, “you can’t let the latest technology pull you away from the easiest thing. Sometimes old-fashioned shoe leather works best.” This is something organized crime figure James "Whitey Bulger" understood as well.  After the Gardner Heist, Bulger dispatched two of his most senior and trusted confederates, Kevin Weeks and Stephen Flemmi to find out who took the paintings. Anne Hawley understood: "Hawley was so desperate she reached out to the Vatican to ask Pope John Paul II to issue a papal appeal. She also approached William Bulger, president of the state Senate, asking that he to his brother Whitey to see what he knew.  The notorious gangster was fruitlessly chasing leads himself. The heist had happened in his territory and he figured he was owed tribute." the New York Daily News reported in 2015.  Ulric...

Blog Table of Contents In a radio interview on WNPR in September of 2017" Stephen Kurkjian said that "for 28 years the FBI has labored diligently on the case." That is the very opposite of the conclusion anyone would draw, who considered Kurkjian's own book, Master Thieves , the last word on the diligence, or lack thereof,  of this investigation by the FBI, most especially in the book's fourth chapter, called  "Anne Hawley's Burden"  Kurkjian offers his own first-person account, i n a later chapter,   of bringing what he considered credible information about the Heist and the possible location of the stolen paintings to investigators in 2014, not as a journalist but as a citizen, describing an utter absence of any follow-up up with him, or replies to his own inquiries after that met even a minimum standard of common courtesy:   " I had met both men [Geoff Kelly and Anthony Amore] numerous times in the past, but on  each of those oc...

Blog Table of Contents FBI and Worcester Police with the recovered paintings from 1972 Worcester Art Museum Heist   The 1972 Worcester Art Museum Heist was a perfect success from a law enforcement standpoint. The stolen paintings:  Rembrandt’s  St. Bartholomew , Pablo Picasso’s  Mother and Child , and two works by Paul Gauguin,  The Brooding Woman  and  Head of a Woman , were quickly recovered by the FBI together with the city of Worcester police, and all of the perpetrators, were identified, apprehended and convicted, including  the mastermind,  Florian "Al Monday, who was given a prison sentence of nine to 20 years.   Like the Worcester art museum heist and really any theft or robbery, with the Gardner Heist law enforcement had two missions: to recover what was stolen, and to bring those responsible to justice.  As thieves flee the crime scene with what they have taken, catching the criminals and recovering the art ar...